Music

Rita Sahai was among ten Indian-American achievers to be honored by the National Federation of Indian American Associations (NFIA), at its 18th biennial convention, which was held March 6–8, 2015, in Cerritos, California. The award given to Sahai was in the category of Liberal and Fine Arts.

Fitting a squeeze-box Argentinian bandoneón – an essential element of tango dance-hall bands – into a classical-music milieu is a bit of a stretch. The two sound-worlds are so fundamentally different that it’s hard to imagine how they could intersect. Nonetheless, star Argentinian bandoneónist J.P. Jofre and the Santa Rosa Symphony gave it a whirl on Sunday at Weill Hall in Rohnert Park, premiering a concerto for bandoneón and orchestra by Pablo Ortiz, an Argentinian professor of composition at UC Davis.

The second gem of the evening was composer Dan VanHassel’s fzzl, written for snare drum with transducer. Percussionist Megan Shieh was a dynamic presence in a work informed by African drumming. Van Hassel’s score makes ample use of all sides of the snare drum.

Composer Pablo Ortiz will have his Bandoneon Concerto premiered by the Santa Rosa Symphony, with J.P. Jofre, for whom the work was written, on February 7th at the Weill Concert Hall at the Green Music Center.

Baritone Mischa Bouvier was vocally and dramatically larger than life as the bumbling giant and murderous monstrosity that Polyphemus is. His gruesome act of crushing Acis under a stone leads to one of the baroque’s saddest musical moments, in which the chorus sings, unaccompanied, “Ah, the gentle Acis is no more,” and the members of the excellent ABS chorus, for just a moment, managed to bring time to a standstill.

Composer Sam Nichols had a first performance of his things that had no opposites—fragments from Tim Horvath for soprano, flute, guitar, and harp—with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, on their December 7 and 8 “Sung and Strummed” concerts (2014). Nichols received a Fromm Foundation award and commission for the piece. As reviewed by Benjamin Frandzel of San Francisco Classical Voice:

On November 25, 2014, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University announced Sam Nichols as one of twelve composers to receive commissions for a work to be performed in 2015–16. Kurt Rohde won a Fromm commission in 2013, and Laurie San Martin in 2011. According to the Fromm Foundation’s press release:

September 21, 1922 – November 20, 2014

The musicologist Sydney Robinson Charles, professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, died November 20, 2014, in Hopkins, Minnesota, where she had moved to be nearer to her son, Gordon, his wife, Susan, and her grandchildren, William and Caroline. She served her entire musicological career (1961–85) on the Davis campus, where she was central in establishing musicology and its infrastructure, including the foundations for the Ph.D. degree inaugurated in 1989.

Professor Anna Maria Busse Berger has earned two national awards for her article, “Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, (University of California Press, Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 475–522). With these two awards and her 2006 award from the Society for Music Theory, Busse Berger has been given the top scholarly prize from all three major music societies in the United States.

Chris Reynolds, faculty in the Music department and recipient of the 2013 UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Research, is featured on the One World, One UC Davis page. Professor Reynolds is recognized for his impact on students, teaching them how to develop and apply critical thinking skills using a subject that inspires and engages them — great music.